Economic development, current events, travel, sustainable living, and fatherhood, all from an agrarian perspective

Monday, July 14, 2014

The Central American refugee crisis

I have been really stricken by the recent developments along the US border, where a flood of children, often unaccompanied by adults, is seeking refuge outside of their Central American homelands. The media seems to focus on the logistical challenges to the US of "processing" these kids. This influx appears to be unlike anything our country has faced before. Frankly, I have somewhat avoided the news on this issue, because I can't handle it emotionally. It just tears me apart to think about the human suffering of all these kids fleeing violence, and how their families back home must feel without them. Not to mention the kids who haven't fled and are subject to mutilation and death by ruthless gangs.

But beyond my personal reaction, and the limited knowledge of the issue that I seem to share with many people here in the US, I feel like we're missing the point if we focus too much on the difficulties facing the US border and immigration bureaucracy as it tries to figure out what to do with these kids. Among other things, this focus can lead us to interpret recent events as an immigration crisis, and distract us from what I think the real issue is: refugees fleeing a conflict.

The kids and even adults fleeing Central America right now are not mere economic migrants, looking for more lucrative work in a wealthier country. Presumably many of the kids weren't working back home, and won't be of working age in the US for some years yet. No, these are people fleeing a bloody conflict. As such, my take is that they should be treated not as mere immigrants but as refugees. Which is to say that they should be accepted into the US at the border, and dealt with as we deal with refugees or asylum seekers. This would not lighten the burden of processing, or the difficulty for both US immigration officials and refugees as they await processing in temporary shelters or camps. But it would prevent the refugees from being summarily deported to the dangerous areas they are fleeing.

I am by no means trying to belittle or discount the importance or scale of the Afghan conflict, and I know my numbers are drawn from lots of sources--they are not meant to be definitive, but they give a good idea of the scale of death and suffering in Honduras. I am merely trying to illustrate that northern Central America right now is a more violent area than even many recognized conflict zones like Afghanistan. The violence in Central America is not mere street crime; it is the aftermath of long-drawn, bloody civil conflicts that "ended" rather ambiguously barely 20 years ago (with a 2009 coup in Honduras as the most recent civil conflict in the bunch). As we are seeing in Colombia, the end of formal conflict and the dissolution of formal armed actors (as happened with the AUC paramilitaries in 2006-2008) often gives rise to even more pernicious armed groups that no longer have the banner of a political cause to moderate their brutality. Furthermore, a culture of violence takes hold after long civil conflicts, such that what would be simple spats in other places turn into bloody murders or massacres.